What’s New in iOS 6 Mail App

In addition to the all-new Maps app, improvements to Notifications and mobile Safari, revamped Music, iTunes and App Store apps in iOS 6, the Mail app also comes with new features and improvements.

It was one of the major new features Apple had showcased at the WWDC 2012 Keynote back in June.

So let's take a look at the new features and improvements in the Mail app in iOS 6:

VIP Lists And Mailbox:

You can create a VIP list in iOS 6, so you don't miss emails from important people in your life. You can access emails from the VIPs via a separate VIP mailbox that is iCloud enabled, which means that your VIP mailbox is synced across your iOS devices.

To add a VIP, launch the Mail app, tap on VIP under Mailboxes and then tap on the Add VIP... option. You can then select the Contacts that you want to add to the VIP list.

You can customize the notifications and alert tones for VIP lists (Launch the Mail App, tap on VIP under Mailboxes and then tap on VIP Alerts option).

Pull to refresh:

Apple has finally added the pull-to-refresh functionality to the Mail app and removed the refresh button from the utility bar at the bottom. You can use the pull-to-refresh feature to check if you have new emails across all your Mailboxes or for a specific Mailbox.

Add Video and Images:

You can finally add videos and photos right within the Mail app.

To attach photo or video to an email, tap the insertion point to display the selection buttons and then navigate to Select | Select All -> Quote Level -> Insert Photo or Video. Tapping on Insert Photo or Video, opens the Photos folder, from here you can navigate to the Camera roll or Photo Stream to attach the photo or video to the email.

Customize Notifications Per Email Account:

In iOS 5.x.x, you could customize notifications only for the Mail app across all your email accounts, which was not too convenient if you have multiple email accounts and some not so important. In iOS 6, you can customize notifications for each email account, thus giving you more granular control over notifications.

Launch the Settings app, tap on Notifications, tap on Mail and the respective email account from the list to set custom notifications.

You can also set custom notifications for VIP's here, which will override all other Mail notification settings.

Signature Per Email Account:

You can create a signature per email account in iOS 6.

Launch the Settings app, scroll down and tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then scroll down and tap on the Signature and tap on Per Account to customize the signature per email account as you can see in the screenshot below.

HTML Signatures:

HTML Signatures are now supported in iOS 6. You can copy and paste the rich text signature created on your Mac or PC and paste it in the Mail Signature settings. It retains the text formatting and links.

Other changes:

• If you have a Gmail/Google App Account, you finally get the option to Delete Message or Archive Message by tapping and holding on the Archive icon from the utility bar at the bottom. Please note that the Archive button is visible only if you've enabled Archive Messages in Mail settings. If Archive Messages is disabled, then you will see the Delete button and will only get the option to Delete Message when you tap and hold on it.
• You can now open password-protected Microsoft Office documents
• You can mark an email as read or flag an email by tapping on a new Flag button in the utility bar at the bottom instead of tapping on the Mark text (which seemed a little out of place when Apple introduced it in iOS 5). You can also access the flagged emails via the new Flagged mailbox.
• Tap and Hold on the Compose button to select or delete Mail drafts.
• iCloud allows you to create up to three aliases that all share the iCloud mailbox. In iOS 6, you can finally select an alias as the default address to send from.

Let us know what you think about improvements made to the Mail app in iOS 6 in the comments. If you find something new in iOS 6 Mail app, please feel free to drop us a line in the comments as we would love to share it here.